At Eighty Two: A Journal
Thompson Library Rare Books and Manuscripts Library,
The William Charvat Collection of American Literature
PS3537 .A832 Z4626 1996

“Memory is full of riches, grief, and joy." 

At Eighty Two: A Journal is the eighth and final journal of poet and writer May Sarton. Sarton's audience was broad, and her various autobiographical works appealed especially to those interested in an alternative lifestyle to tradition and heteronormativity. Sarton published her first personal journal at age 15, but the next journal she published was in 1959 at the age of 47. By her journal Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year, she had to use a tape recorder because she was physically unable to write. At Eighty Two covers July 1993-August 1994 and was published a year after her death. In it, she writes about her gratitude for life and her struggles with aging. She writes candidly of the frustrations of physical frailty in the wake of a stroke and maintaining her large Maine house, and her anxiety towards feeling unaccepted by the literary establishment. Despite these struggles, she also describes her gratitude for heartfelt letters from readers, visits with friends, and her cat Pierrot.